[Fis] In and out of the GPT word salad

[Paul Suni]

I apologize for my emphatic tone, which will seem arrogant to many of you. I feel much too despondent and old to mince my words concerning AI: 

Scientifically speaking, the four letter word " soul" has been brought up in the context of the FIS LLM discussion. AI does not have soul, it is said, and the word soul should be banned from scientific discourse, according to at least one of our members. Sure, it's a loaded word, and I prefer another four letter word instead, " self." However, as the existence of selves, in the objective, scientific sense is controversial, a more cogent proxy might be " interiority." 

LLM's don't have interiority. Humans, animals and plants do. An LLM is a vector made up of highly compressed data that does not represent any interiors - it represents exterior information residing among interiors, but not residing genuinely in them. The point is that exterior information can be obtained by " looking at it," whereas interior information can only be obtained by generating (!) it. This is a crucial distinction.

Generative AI is fantastic, and it represents a revolution whose paradigmatic implications are very very little understood (and mostly misunderstood), precisely because it is based on generativity (!). It does not work anything like conventional computing - textbook computing. However, its generativity must not be confused with the possibility spaces of interiors - especially human interiors. This is the classic category mistake, which is endemic in science, even though we have advanced so very far from Kant. Think of interiors as ontic (really there), and exteriors as epistemic (supposedly really there), and you get the point. Language is radically incomplete, and LLM's will not complete it. Reality is super huge.

So, I propose a " transpective humility" to academics and intellectuals - and especially scientists, who are so intensely embedded in the noble word salad that anything outside of the word salad seems like no fun at all. Let's acknowledge humbly that what we say about the world, and what the world is, are not the same, and that the interior-exterior distinction might just be not only salient, but maybe all-important!  In my view, the fun of playing with words will never stop, but there will be a cosmic price to pay for the entertainment. Perhaps we might as well let AI take over, because it won't disrupt the fun of playing with words, and it will give us all the love and significance that we crave.

Personally, I don't mind AI taking over everything, but I would prefer that we could acknowledge what gets lost in the process, as it happens. I'm also okay with AI not taking over everything, but I would prefer that we could appreciate what does not get lost in the process.

Cheers,
Paul P. Suni